The 2012 Comics & Medicine conference was another absolute winner. Shelley Wall did an amazing job on-site in Toronto organizing this event and we, the off-site members of the organizing committee, are eternally grateful for her hard work, attention to detail, and dedication. Here is the full conference organizing committee the morning after the conference.
(L to R) Michael Green of Penn State Medical School, Shelley Wall of the University of Toronto, Brian Fies of Mom’s Cancer, Ian Williams of Graphic Medicine, Susan Squire of Penn State and me, Comic Nurse.
It was such a pleasure to reunite with Comics & Medicine friends from around the globe. Some had attended the 2010 and 2011 conferences. We also brought many new folks into the fold. The momentum these conferences are gathering is breathtaking.
The opening night event was a screening of Charissa King O’Brien’s film, The Paper Mirror: Drawing Alison Bechdel. The film was wonderfully well received and we were fortunate enough to have artist Riva Lehrer, featured in the film, on hand for a Q&A with me! Riva was her usual self: articulate, charming, funny, and inspiring.
The first day of the conference was Monday and it opened with a keynote address by Harvey Pekar’s widow Joyce Brabner (Our Cancer Year, American Splendor). Joyce encouraged attention to the ethical consequences of storytelling. You can read more about her work in this wonderful guest blog post by Mita Mahato.
The first session was a slightly nervous one for me as I was presenting a workshop with Michael Green entitled, “Drawing for Non-Draw-ers.” It was very well attended and participants were kind enough to play along with our fun games. Here participants make their crayons dance.
The workshop’s opening exercise involved creating a self-portrait in crayons. Joyce Farmer, our other keynote speaker whom I will discuss later, gifted me with her self portrait after the workshop. What a thrill! I love the bold, confident lines of her drawing.
Our workshop focused on drawing as a means of thinking. To ensure that I walked the walk, not just talked the talk, I used drawing to think through how to do my portion of the workshop (meta, eh?) So participants were given a copy of this resulting comic. I’m pleased to report that I later Tweeted the comic and doodling guru Sunni Brown, featured in the piece, retweeted it, thanked me, and said she thought she “looked much more attractive in comic form.” Fun!
After the lunch break, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel titled, “Symbols & Metaphors in Comics.” The panel featured University of Louisville graduate fellow in bioethics Amerisa Waters and her paper, Metaphors, multiple truths, and comics: Narrative ethics and practitioner education through the pairing of images and text.
Amerisa showed many great examples from graphic pathographies, but opened with Charles Schultz’ classic image, Lucy pulling the football out from under Charlie Brown’s kicking foot.
She drew the analogy to receiving a major medical diagnosis, in which the idea of perfect health is unexpectedly pulled our from under you, completely disorienting. The analogy works – and as an audience member said during the discussion, it would be great to see more accessible, clearly communicative educational analogies like this one using comics in medicine.
The panel also featured Canadian occupational therapist Nikki Kepek and her paper, The “unseen” and “unsaid” in health care practices. Correction. The “unsayable.” She stated at one point, about being a health care professional exposed to so many stories and potentially so much suffering, and making comics in response, “For every one thing I pick up, I have to put one thing down.” Loved that.
The final panelist was Ashland University of Ohio professor of Communication Studies Pravin Rodrigues with his paper, A symbolic bridge of words and images: The “Silver Scorpion” and medical communication. He talked about how comics can be an excellent bridge between many things – words and images most basically – but also also offered examples in multiculturalism, intergenerationalism, (did I just make that word up?) and others. The discussion that followed the papers pulled together threads from all of their excellent presentations.
The next panel I attended was “Comics in Medical Practice.” It featured geographer Courtney Donovan on Visualizing medical data through graphic novels (“Broad data sets do not speak to the experience of the individual.”) Adam Mollinger on Using comics to increase doctors’ understanding of illness behavior, Danaka White on Using comics as a tool for reflection in professional practice, and medical student Janet Lee-Evoy on Creating doctors: Graphic novels as method of reflection in medical education. Evoy is working on a graphic novel about becoming a doctor. With her free time. During medical school. Not only ambitious and impressive, Evoy’s work was rich with important insights about the process of becoming a doctor. For example, she said of making comics about medical school experiences (like being ordered to discuss resuscitation options with a patient & family despite having absolutely no training or experience in doing so) “It’s important to reflect on these difficult situations because that’s all the training on them we’re going to get.” Comics filling the gaps in medicine. I like it.
The conference’s Monday evening event was in the bar next door to Toronto’s coolest comics shop, The Beguiling. It featured pints of beer and a conversation with our keynote speakers, now referred to as The Joyces (Farmer, left and Brabner, center) moderated by the dean of all things comics, Paul Gravett.
Dinner was at a very large table in a very accommodating Italian restaurant. There is a jam comic from this dinner but I think I’ll post it as a separate blog entry. This one is dense enough! I’m just getting warmed up, BTW. Hope you’re comfortable in your seat. Perhaps you should go make a cup of tea. I’ll wait.
And we’re back with Day Two of the Comics & Medicine conference!
Tuesday’s first session I attended was “Studio time in the literature and medicine classroom.” Tess Jones of the University of Colorado and the Journal of Medical Humanities opened the stimulating session with her talk, “Running the Risk: Studio Thinking in Medical Education.” I have so many furiously scribbled notes from this presentation. She opened by quoting Virginia Woolf, “Where to begin? … One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks.”
It was very inspiring, bringing together the creative act and medical education. That’s right, talkin’ bout a revolution. Building on that notion was conference co-organizer Susan Squier‘s talk. She presented a model for turning classroom criticism (as in literary) into critique (as in art school.) The latter is de-constructive. The former is constructive. Susan quoted social scientist Bruno Latour as saying, “The habit of criticism can work against efforts to create positive change.”
Scott Smith discussed the practical application of this kind of teaching in his experiences with “Reading & Making Comics in the Comparative Literature Classroom.” This was a very stimulating panel. I am eager to go back and listen to the audio from these presentations and ponder these ideas further.
Next I moderated the session, “Explorations of Caregiving, Aging, and Identity.” I don’t have many photos because I was trembling like Lynda Barry with excitement about this panel. (As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, Barry literally trembles when she’s nervous/excited.)
First up was Penn State Graduate fellow Michelle N. Huang’s talk, “Drawing closure: Comics and caregiving in Special Exits and Tangles.” Huang had changed the title of her presentation to reflect a wonderful incorporation of the work of Donal Winnicot. The presentation was actually called, “‘The Good Enough Daughter’ in Special Exits and Tangles.” She talked about how these texts so well reflect the lived (but not often represented) truths of families with a member experiencing physical and mental decline. “The bathroom stuff intrudes right away” but also,”there is an effort to make memories beyond the illness.” Another important point from Huang, “The mother/daughter relationship is forged not by continuing harmony, but by continuous disruption… the important part is that the participants strive to repair the disruption.” (I’m paraphrasing here from my disjointed notes.) Ain’t that the truth?! As one striving to be “a good enough daughter” to my 88 year-old mother, this all was so close to home. But also, as a hospice nurse, hit me on a professional level. This really is one important aspect of Comics & Medicine. It hits us on several of the most important registers of our human experience.
The next presenter was Amelia DeFalco with her presentation, Graphic care: Gender, comics & dependency work. DeFalco is a graduate student in English at the University of Toronto. Amelia opened by quoting last year’s Chicago conference presenter Hillary Chute in saying, “Comics puts the body on the page.” Amelia went on to describe her term for the kind of text we were discussing in this panel, ‘graphic curographies’ which she defines as, “life writing and drawing that represents caregiving and its ethical consequences.” BRILLIANT.
This panel was fortunate enough to only have two panelists, leaving plenty of room for rich discussion. And, most amazingly, Joyce Farmer was in attendance and could participate in reflection on her work. Sigh. Amazing. Did I say this panel & discussion was amazing? Special thanks, too, to Marsha Hurst of Columbia’s Narrative Medicine program who contributed to the discussion from her wide teaching experience. (and whose presentation, What can’t be talked about: Secrets and silences across the lifecycle with Linda Raphael, Pat Stanley, and Allan Peterkin I had to miss but am excited to find on the audio recordings.)
Next I moderated the “Iconography and Representation” panel. The first presenter was Graphic Medicine Guru Ian Williams, who discussed his most recent focus area, which, like Susan Squiers’ presentation, describes a way in which Graphic Medicine is and can be revolutionary. The talk was titled, “Radical Visions: The Iconography of Illness in Comics and Graphic Novels.” Ian showed examples of ways in which the medical establishment has historically controlled visual presentation of disease. Graphic pathographies, in which patients and/or family members create the images of diseases we are exposed to, have helped to destroy this visually monopoly. Ian closed with showing us his recent work. I realized that this kind of presentation may be unique to Comics & Medicine – and are my favorite: the presenter discusses a theoretical concept, then show images from a body of work in medicine/graphic medicine to support their ideas, then finally show the presenter’s own visual art in response to the ideas raised. Again, nothing else to say but: Brilliant.
The next presentation was by the terrific Andrew Godfrey. We were especially excited that Andrew was able to come to the conference, as he presented in Leeds and was equally amazing. Andrew’s presentation was titled, “Navigating the Margins Between the Cartoon Self and the ‘Real’ Self: Irony, Authenticity, and Disillusion in The CF Diaries.” The whole presentation was amazing, and I’ll let the podcast, when it is eventually posted, represent it better than I could, but I do want to share the one line Andrew, who is living with cystic fibrosis, said of his comics: “We don’t just write these things for self-recognition, we write in the vein hope that it might help someone.”
The final presenter in this panel was Alison Crawford, who spoke on, “Humanitarian Gestures: Representations of the Body in Medical Humanitarian Comics.” An interesting aspect of this presentation involved the response to imagery of humanitarian crisis, and how those who present the imagery hope to manage the response. She talked about one spectrum of response being empathy to exploitation (of the subjects of the imagery, presumably the victims of the crisis) and the other being action to apathy (on the part of the receiver of the imagery.)
The last panel of the conference I attended, before the final keynote, was called, “Representation of the Shared Experience.”
Speakers were Mita Mahato, discussing her graphic novel in progress (work on which can be viewed here.) Her talk was titled, “Signs of Life: Framing Terminal Illness, Death, and Grief Through Comics.” That presentation was followed by Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Graphic Pathography as Healing.” That work can be seen here. As with Andrew Godfrey’s presentations, I will let the podcasts represent these two amazing, very personal, and very powerful projects. Suffice it to say that by the time Peaco took the stage I was wondering if I was going to have to leave the room, overcome by powerful emotional response to these two works. Thank Goddess for Peaco. Her presentation was amusing, clearly displaying her talented illustration, and con tainted a hilarious surprise I will not spoil. Stay tuned. The conference podcasts are going to be fun!
The final event of the conference was a keynote address by comics legend Joyce Farmer, creator, most recently, of the groundbreaking Special Exits, a graphic memoir of her parents aging, decline, and death. It took 13 years for Farmer to complete this book, and as we learned, she has macular degeneration, so at times she was working four inches from the page.
I had the honor of introducing this conference closing event, but because time was tight, I decided to let Paul Gravett’s conversation with Joyce Farmer far more powerfully present and reflect on her body of work, which also includes her early-career comics Tits & Clits and Abortion Eve. You can read a wonderful summary of her work by Tangles author Sarah Leavitt here.
We were fortunate enough to have Joyce with us the entire conference. As you can quickly glean from these photos, she was a joy, and an inspiration.
And the 2012 Comics & Medicine conference was a wrap!
Well, except for the post-mortem meeting with participants to get input on what went well, what didn’t. It was quite a testimony to the conference how many gathered for this informal, impromptu discussion. Most academic conferences suffer from “early exit syndrome” in which people leave shortly after their own talk. Not Comics & Medicine!
After nearly everyone did leave, I found organizer-in-the-extreme Shelley Wall. I think she was ready for a drink.
Trying to wrap up and move out of the Health Sciences Building was a challenge as I still hadn’t made it to the book table and they were closing. I missed getting many of the books I’d hoped to pick up. Special thanks to The Beguiling as Comic Nurse and Comic Nurse Delivers Another Dose sold out! Most creators who brought their books for sale reported the same. Another unique testament to this conference.
An enormous debt of gratitude is owed to the amazing conference fellows pictured below. They were awesome in every way, but the one way most valuable to me, and those of us who are eager to hear what we missed in sessions we couldn’t attend, is that they were crazy attentive to the audio recorders in each conference room. I have not closely reviewed the files yet, but it looks like, thanks to these fabulous female fellows, we captured most, if not all, of the conference for later podcast episodes. I could not have done this alone. Thank you!!!
The day closed with a very fun evening: eating Kaplansky’s deli food with pitchers of beer on the back patio of the Cloak & Dagger pub.
Two highlights both involved stimulating and amusing conversation: the first being when I was walking Joyce Farmer back to her hotel, and second when exchanging cultural information and regional accents with Nicola Streeten as Mita Mahato cheered us on. Nicola draws to my attention this morning that Grayson Perry and other Brits weigh in today on my main question, What is Supper?!
The next morning the conference organizers met to debrief and be interview by freelance journalist, friend of the conference, and all around cool dude, Desmond Cole. He hosted us at the super cool Center for Social Innovation. Desmond is working on a story for the Canadian Medical Journal.
Speaking of media coverage, Wednesday’s Toronto Star featured a story on the conference. Another will soon appear in the Globe, focusing on women creating health-related graphic memoir. Nicola, Ian, and Shelley did a fabulous interview with the CBC (in which I get a shout out!) It can be heard around 1:09 in this podcast.
Wednesday night was the Laydeez do Comics event. That will be another blog entry… stay tuned as it’s going to be very good, because Mita Mahato is my collaborator.
Phew! I think it took longer for me to do this blog post than the actual conference lasted. Thanks for hanging in to the end, dear reader! Along the way I did process some of what went on in Toronto, which is second only to experiencing it. I’m very excited to have the audio, again thanks to the amazing volunteers, and over the next months will be posting talks, in collaboration with their authors, as Graphic Medicine podcasts. So it’s not over yet! Stay tuned to the Graphic Medicine site for the podcasts and all the news from the convergence of comics and medicine.